


drawing me in

by nessismore



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Drawing, F/M, Gen, Prompt Fill, silliness, stick figures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-27
Updated: 2013-10-27
Packaged: 2017-12-30 15:34:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1020380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nessismore/pseuds/nessismore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Darcy doodles, Steve doodles back, and a friendship is struck up in the form of stick figures.</p>
            </blockquote>





	drawing me in

**Author's Note:**

> Written for themousethatroars over at tumblr, who prompted: I'd love to see a ficlet where Darcy has a habit of doodling on the sides of Jane's notes (little cartoons of the team, Pepper as a superhero, Coulson as a ninja, that sort of thing). Steve somehow finds them and opens up to Darcy about his own drawings and they bond over sketchbooks.
> 
> This doesn't _quite_ follow the prompt, but there are definitely doodles and Steve definitely finds them. It owes a lot to Gavin DeGraw's "Bad Day" music video.
> 
> Not beta read so apologies for any errors.

Steve’s looking for Bruce in the labs when he finds the first one. The lab is mostly empty, since neither Bruce or Dr. Foster, who are the prime occupants, like other people cluttering up their space. Steve’s seen a few people around on occasion but there are few constants that Steve’s noticed.

Bruce is nowhere to be found, but Dr. Foster is there, working furiously at her lab station. Through a series of monosyllables, she manages to communicate that Bruce has just stepped out but should be back in a minute. At least, he thinks that’s what she’s said, so he plunks himself down at a lab counter and decides to wait.

One minute turns to five turns to ten, and soon his eyes and his mind start to wander. Both catch on the piece of paper in front of him. It appears to be a lab report, notes hastily written around and through the text, but that isn’t what’s caught his attention.

On the bottom of the lab report are two crudely drawn stick figures: a woman in a lab coat, hair with enough resemblance to Dr. Foster’s now that he assumes it’s her, and a man in a suit. The figures are helpfully labeled Jane and Coulson. In the drawing, Jane is throwing daggers (or poorly shaped birds) in Coulson’s general direction, and it startles a chuckle out of him. 

Without thinking, he pulls out a pen of his own and gives Coulson a shield, the Captain America shield since the man seems so fond of it. His perfect circles look odd next to the hastily drawn lines, but he likes it. He’s contemplating adding another panel when Bruce comes in, and it’s back to business.

—

The cartoon completely slips out of his mind until a few days later when he walks into the break room on the Avengers level and sees a pile of papers on the kitchenette counter. It’s not unusual to see things like that scattered around the common room, so he thinks nothing of it until he sees the stick figures. His mood immediately brightens, especially when he sees a new addition to the scene: a woman in a skirt suit, a cape streaming behind her as she comes out of the sky. Then an arrow, and he turns the paper over to see stick Pepper flying through the air, shield in her hands. Stick Coulson is falling, hands in the air like he’s just let go of the shield.

Steve snorts, wondering what Coulson’s done to piss his mystery artist off. With a grin, he adds a parachute, then a body of water underneath for good measure. He grabs the cup of coffee he initially came in for, wondering what his artist will draw next as he leaves to go to his meeting. When he comes back, the pile of papers are still there. He laughs when he sees his artist’s additions. They added sharks.

Steve adds a little sign that says “People are friends, not food.” He hopes it’ll make his artist smile.

—

It’s a couple of weeks before he gets back to the labs, looking for Bruce once again to discuss the condition of a woman they’d rescued on a mission. Once again, he finds Bruce gone and Dr. Foster present. She looks entirely absorbed with her work, so he doesn’t even bother asking her about when Bruce might be back.

Instead, he casually makes his way over to her station, eyes scanning the mess of papers around her station for further adventures of Coulson. To his disappointment, there’s no sign of their joint drawings. To his delight, there’s a completely new one, drawn on the left margin. An approximation of the quinjet sits at the top of the page, a generic circle for the head of the pilot, and a woman standing in an open door, her hair like Natasha’s. Halfway down the page is a man falling through the air. His artist gave the man a bow and arrow strapped to the figure’s back. His artist apparently has quite the violent imagination. 

He starts to give Clint a parachute, then decides it’s too practical. Steve gives him wings instead.

As he’s leaving his meeting with Bruce, he stops by Dr. Foster’s lab station again. The page is half buried underneath a fresh blanket of paperwork, but he sees the artist has given Clint a beak, and Steve laughs.

—

For weeks, he and his artist go back and forth. The artist starts the comic, Steve adds to it, and together they build a collection of ridiculous drawings of the Avengers and associates. They usually feature someone being injured, falling, or on one memorable occasion, being eaten by a bear. Steve always tries to at least brighten the comics up, unless he’s annoyed with her subjects, too. Her favorite targets to pick on are Coulson and Clint, but she draws everyone, even Steve. Captain America doesn’t make appearances in their works often, but Steve’s heart always stutters a bit when he realizes his artist has drawn him. It’s weird and it’s flattering and he doesn’t know how to deal with it, so Steve adds figures of his own to change the direction of the story. He’s particularly proud of his stick figure Nick Fury (eyepatch and all). 

It’s like a game, one that he isn’t eager to end anytime soon, so he finds himself actively avoiding attempts to search athe faces of all of the lab employees for anyone that could be his artist.

Other people have noticed his sudden propensity for Bruce’s company, but he’s pretty sure no one else has noticed he’s communicating with someone who works for Dr. Foster through silly comics. Part of him wonders where the drawings go when they disappear, and he finds himself constantly wondering what his mysterious artist is like. 

When he enters the lab floor for the fourth time that week, he’s disappointed when he doesn’t see the familiar rushed lines of stick figures and heads back to Bruce’s area to wait, ostensibly to talk to Bruce about tracking a mysterious energy source. Once again, Bruce is elsewhere, and Steve sits on a steel to wait. 

He’s surprised when he sees another stick figure drawing at Bruce’s lab station. It’s another lab report—they always seem to be—and a note scribbled in the margins that says, “Jane’s ordered me to stop defacing her research.”

Beside the note, there’s a stick figure drawing with glasses, reaching for a disproportionately huge plate of cookies. There’s a line beside it, delineating a break in the scene, and then another of a stick figure who can only be Tony running away with the cookies, smaller this time, being chased by a figure that bleeds out of the margins and into the text, unrecognizable in it’s lumpiness except for the glasses perched on its nose. The Hulk. Steve isn’t sure whether to be horrified or amused.

“Go ahead, laugh. I did.” Steve turns to see Bruce behind him, a wry half smile on his lips. “Darcy’s a card.”

Steve’s a little embarrassed that his comic adventures aren’t exactly a secret, but he’s startled to realize that his artist has a name. “Darcy?”

Bruce smiles. “Dr. Foster’s main assistant. She likes to doodle.” That tells Steve nothing of what Bruce knows about Steve’s own relationship/non-relationship with Darcy, so Steve smiles and brings up the main reason he’s in Bruce’s lab. All the while, his fingers itch to add to Darcy’s little drawing, but he waits until Bruce is distracted by calculations before he pulls out his pen and draws another plate of cookies in Bruce’s hands. Then he adds a frame to her comic, this one of stick figure Bruce, cookie in his hand, smile on his face. When Bruce turns, Steve hastily flips the page of the lab report over, and turns his attention to the subject at hand.

—

For a week, Steve contemplates Darcy. It’s odd to finally put a name to her presence, even though he’s been thinking of their drawing exchange as an odd form of friendship for weeks. He wonders if he’s seen her before, realizes that with as much time as he’s spent in the lab of late, he must have. He wonders if she knows who _he_ is, and realizes that since she’s probably managed to figure it out, given where she’d left that last doodle.

It’d be nice, he thinks, to have a friend who’s comfortable drawing Captain America riding a dolphin. Or maybe it’s a shark. Either way, it makes him smile and there aren’t so many things that do that these days. 

Actual work keeps him from the labs for a week, but he decides that coming over and just asking her out for coffee is too mundane.

When he gets a chance, he dashes over to the lab to put his plan in motion.

—

When Darcy walks into work that afternoon, Jane is scowling at her. Since that’s nothing new, Darcy isn’t fazed. She does what she always does when Jane’s glaring at her: she ignores it. She just tosses Jane a donut and puts on a pot of coffee, throws Jane a donut, and goes about putting things in order. She knows Jane’s system, can figure out by this point the organized chaos of Jane tossing notes around the lab, knows how to arrange things again so that they’re neater and still allow Jane to find the notes easily at a later point in time.

All that done, she realizes that Jane is still glowering. “What?” Darcy finally asks.

“I thought I told you no more drawing on my research.”

Darcy rolls her eyes. “You did, and I don’t.” 

It had forced her to come up with some other way to keep up her ridiculous “artistic” communications with Captain America—er, Steve Rogers (since she’d figured out it was him, she still isn’t sure how to refer to him in her head), so Bruce has been the surprisingly cooperative scientist who lets her run roughshod over his work as long as she didn’t interfere with anything.

Jane’s scowl deepens as she grabs a sheet of paper behind her. “Then what do you call _this_?” 

Darcy stares blankly at a drawing that definitely isn’t hers. Everything’s too well defined for one thing. Steve.

She snatches the paper out of Jane’s hands as Jane starts up on a rant. Darcy isn’t bothered—if the notes were essential, she could have it scanned and cleaned up in no time at all. Really, Darcy doesn’t know why Jane’s complaining, considering the page isn’t even actual research. It looks more like a grocery list than anything else, but that’s not important at the moment. No, the more pressing matter is the sketch in her hands. This is the first time he’s drawn first, and she has a case of the warm and fuzzies that he’s initiated things. 

The doodle—if one can call it that—is far more detailed than anything she’s ever done, even though he’s tried to imitate her style. Since their first exchange, she could tell that he’s got some artistic talent—definitely unlike her. 

The doodle takes up most of the bottom margin, and it’s two figures—one female, one male—sitting at a table. There are two cups in front of them, little whorls of steam coming from both of them, a pastry counter in the background, even a mustachioed figure behind a cash register that makes her laugh out loud. The figures are helpfully labeled with “you” and “me” and a grin crosses Darcy’s face.

Darcy makes her own addition to the doodle before she cleans up a copy of the real notes for Jane. The original she leaves on Bruce’s work station for Steve to find.

She makes a note to buy Jane’s groceries at lunchtime.

—

When Steve walks into the lab, he doesn’t see anyone at Dr. Foster’s work area. He doesn’t even have the flimsiest pretense about what he’s doing there, so he’s almost glad that the lab is empty. He knows from Bruce that Darcy’s going back to school and her schedule is erratic once again. She might not have seen it yet. But after a quick scan of the area, he realizes his comic is gone. Either Dr. Foster had thrown it out, or his artist wasn’t interested in meeting face to face. Steve isn’t going to jump to any conclusions yet.

He glances over Bruce’s lab, tidier but just as alive as Dr. Foster’s with the energy of incipient discovery, and he sees it. His drawing. At first glance, it appears the same. No note scrawled in the corner, nothing to indicate an answer.

And then he sees what she’s added.

A digital clock on the wall that reads 7:00 p.m. An apron on the mustached barista with a logo for a local coffee shop. A calendar (decorated by a patriotic puppy), tomorrow’s date circled.

He grins. He'll take that as a yes.


End file.
